Spotlight on: Polyvore

The hottest name on the lips of fashion digital marketers over the past few weeks and months has been Polyvore, and if you’re not familiar with it, it’s time you have a look!
Polyvore provides a global community of trendsetters with a virtual styling tool to create digital collages of clothing and accessories that can be shared easily across the web. With over 6 million unique visitors and 140 million page views a month, Polyvore is quickly taking the online fashion world by storm.
The brands and designers to collaborate with Polyvore are hardly small unknowns. Net-A-Porter, Diane von Furstenberg, Gap, and Lancôme are just a few examples of brands active on the platform. It’s some of the most recent collaborations, however, that have gotten the web buzzing:
1) Yves Saint Laurent
YSL took the excitement of Fashion’s Night Out in New York and extended it to Polyvore. In addition to participating in the 57th Street boutique, Polyvore opened up a contest to its users where they were asked to use Edition 24, a globetrotting collection from YSL, as the inspiration. As part of the contest, entrants were asked to submit a style set featuring two YSL Edition 24 items and show the city in which they would wear the pieces. With over 2,000 entries into the contest, the winning submission’s creator will receive YSL’s latest handbag, the Multy. Not a bad deal for a fun online activity!
2) The New York Times’ T Magazine
The New York Times has been putting a greater focus on their fashion coverage over the last few years, and taken it a few steps forward with a number of interesting digital initiatives. One of those has been collaboration with Polyvore in their First Look Challenge featuring fairly new to the scene designer, Prabal Gurung. As an exclusive, Gurung gave the NYT and Polyvore users a sneak peek at the Spring/Summer 2011 collection in advance of his runway show in New York. Polyvore users put their creative juices to work and were asked to submit styled sets that featured at least 3 looks from the collection. Over 1700 entries were submitted and the winning sets’ creators won a tour of his studio and a ticket to his Fall/Winter 2011 fashion show in February.
The collaboration was clearly a win for all 3 partners involved. Each was able to get in front of an audience that might not otherwise have been aware of them. Looking forward to seeing if The NYT chooses to partner with Polyvore again…
Do you use Polyvore? What do you see as the opportunities with a site like this? Which have been your favorite collaborations? Leave us your comments below!
Edited by: Gina Conforti